Pop Culture Pick: Promising Young Woman
Carey Mulligan is looking for a little satisfaction. Or revenge...
Image Credit: Focus Features
Welcome to Pop Culture Pick, a catch-all for subjects I want to highlight outside of the usual weekly Weekend Watch columns. In this edition, Carey Mulligan flips the script on predatory males.
Earlier this year, I wrote about two films from actors who had stepped behind the camera. Both are solid efforts, but neither can quite compare to one of the most anticipated releases of the year: Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman. Fennell, who might be better known right now as Camilla Parker Bowles on The Crown, showed what she can do as a writer/producer with the second season of Killing Eve. And now in her feature directorial debut, she proves that that was no fluke: the result is excellent – superbly written, cannily acted and surprising.
Carey Mulligan stars as Cassandra Thomas, who is still recovering from a mysterious trauma that occurred while she was at medical school. Once a superstar scholar and future surgeon, she has retreated from the world, working a rote job at a coffee shop and closing herself off to everything, including her concerned parents (Clancy Brown and Jennifer Coolidge, the latter almost unrecognisable and excellent in a low-key role). But at night, Cassie comes alive in her campaign to wreak deserved havoc on deserving dudes, posing as a drunk girl at clubs and waiting for “nice guys” to prey on her. One by one the men take her home and try to sleep with her, without consent, and suffer the consequences. Cassie’s also about taking down former friends who were involved in the “incident”, including Alison Brie’s preening Madison.
The only bright spot in Cassie’s life – and one she initially resists – is a burgeoning relationship with a seemingly actually nice man, former medical school colleague Ryan (Bo Burnham, deploying personable, affable charm). Fennell’s strength here is constantly shifting the ground under our feet – we want to cheer for Cassie’s campaign, but she’s also so clearly troubled that you want her to seek help in less destructive ways. And as the film snakes its way around the story, you’re constantly kept wondering what might happen next.
Mulligan holds your attention at all times, by turns utterly charming and totally chilling. She has strong support from Laverne Cox as Gail, her boss at the coffee shop, and in one memorable scene, Connie Britton as the Dean of Cassie’s former seat of learning.
Promising Young Woman will make you think, and will often make you angry at the way Cassie and those around her have been treated. It’s so clever and sharp that the movie is far more than its message, and it etches itself on the brain both visually and morally. Likewise, Fennell confirms that she’s a real talent to watch.
Promising Young Woman will arrive in open US cinemas on 25 December. In the UK, the film will be released on 12 February.